


A Wingspan Unbelievable

by anonlytree



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Crack, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 08:38:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1259980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonlytree/pseuds/anonlytree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I’m a perfect piece of ass<br/>Like every Californian</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Wingspan Unbelievable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ballade_at_thirtyfive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ballade_at_thirtyfive/gifts).



 

_ I’m a perfect piece of ass _  
_ Like every Californian _

_~_

  
_Call me._  
  
…  
  
 _Please_  
  
 _…_  
  
 _Steven I KNOW you’re not asleep. Just call OK?_  
  
It’s technically too early for the crack of dawn in Steven’s time zone so Steven doesn’t call even though he is  
most definitely not sleeping. There’s no point pretending that he could be anything but awake at ungodly hours on the morning of his testimonial; he just doesn’t feel like talking to anyone today.  
  
Steven frowns at his phone because what if it’s really serious… Still, he ignores the texts as he makes his way to the kitchen through the early morning stillness of his labyrinthine house.  
  
 _Missing perfect opportunity to take the piss. Possibly long term. Promise._  
  
It takes less than two seconds for Xabi’s touchscreen to glow with life.  
  
“Morning, Xabier!”  
  
Steven swishes orange juice around his mouth and pops the cap back on with his lips pursed, savoring the acidic kick for an extra second. He makes a face at his distorted chromium-tinged features reflected off the slick fridge door. His hair is sticking out in all directions with no regard for the magnitude of the day ahead.  
  
“Good thing I know literally _all_ your weak spots.”  
  
The voice from the other side of the planet sounds just a bit too harried to hit the precise note of smugness Xabi is aiming for. There’s another voice in the background, only this one is a lot chirpier.  
  
“Is that… Katy Perry I hear?” Stevie asks while shoving two thirds of his face inside the fridge.  
  
He’s not even sure if he’s hungry or not, but his stomach vetoes every item on the top shelf on grounds of guilt by association. Everything is too close for comfort to Alex’s diet shakes and he pushes the door shut over the sound of the muffled whine coming through the phone line.  
  
“Ramos tipped the hotel DJ a thousand dollars to let him sing California Girls earlier, so now he has put it on repeat for the last forty minutes. Is… I’m…”  
  
Xabi sounds genuinely _pained_. Drunk and pained. That’s how Stevie knows this is going to be oh so worth it.  
  
“ _Gurls_. It’s California Gurls. It’s a technical term.”  
  
“Whatever. I just need you to call me in… I don’t know… five minutes after I hang up, all right?”  
  
“Oh, I’m going to need a bit more detail than that,” Stevie says, paddling over to the living room couch with the cool scratch of the carpet under his bare feet. “You promised _long term_ quote unquote,” he adds and he can see the martyred face Xabi must be pulling right this second in such blistering detail, it makes Stevie chuckle a bit more venomously than he’d intended.  
  
“Let’s start with why you’re drunk calling me all the way from Los Angeles at this hour instead of just annoying Arbie like you normally do?”  
  
“Unfortunately, I am not drunk,” Xabi grumbles. Trouble is, he sounds so blatantly intoxicated he cannot find it in himself to be quite so insincere about it. “I’m not drunk _enough_. And Álvaro… That _hijo puta_ passed out three hours ago…”  
  
Stevie’s eyebrows shoot up when the unmistakable sound of a distant flushing loo transpires over Xabi’s frustration. Xabi seems to ignore it just fine though.  
  
“Says he feels no social responsibility for letting Sergio loose in Beverly Hills all by himself. He is not picking up his phone... Is too late here and too early in Spain to call anybody else, I need a… a diversion.”  
  
“Are you hiding in a bathroom stall?!?”  
  
“…No.”  
  
The sound of another flushing toilet begs to differ, but Stevie doesn’t insist.  
  
“Just count to… two hundred and call me. I should be back to Sergio’s table by then.”  
  
Katy Perry is now within proper hearing range, crooning lyrically about feakin’ in her jeep.  
  
“You’re aware you can fake call yourself, right?”  
  
“And stand around talking to myself like a _payaso_? There’s two of them, Steven! And the mother, she is watching me with these eyes… is a… a fucking _aguila_ in a dress! Well, hotpants actually… with little silvery… things on them…”  
  
Xabi sighs like a man who’s really not in the mood to go into detail but has just crossed the point of no return.  
  
“Please tell me you’re saying what I think you’re saying… Tell me you really went cougar hunting with Ramos in the Californian desert.”  
  
Xabi ducks behind a strategically placed, brickhouse-shaped bouncer surveying the party from a corner of the bar.  
  
“Would you like that stitched to a fucking pillow?” Xabi hisses. He closes his eyes and runs his hand across his jaw, steadying himself into his dwindling resolve to not maul someone with a bar stool. “He wanted twins, Stevie. Specifically _blonde_ twins. Pues, claro… _he_ dialed the number from the internet site, but after “ _I soccer, I Sergio, Morry Krisma!...”_ guess who had to speak to the nice lady who owns the escort agency?”  
  
A ragged intake of breath that sounds suspiciously like stifled choking is the only answer at first. Then:  
  
“I know Yanks don’t care about football, mate, but… hookers? Really?!?”  
  
“Have you seen Sergio’s hair lately? Do you think anybody would sit next to it for free? Was for the best just to keep him contained inside the hotel and limit the damage anyway… But I had to settle for a mother-daughter pair and you know what? They’re _still_ not blonder than him! You have _no_ idea…”  
  
He pauses waiting for Stevie to overcome the laughing fit that’s taken hold of him in the last minute or so.  
  
“So yes… I have this… this sensación that if I do not get out of here soon, this night will end with me having to bitchslap Ramos on his hospital bed, in the middle of his heart attack, just to remind him that his girlfriend’s name is Pilar. _Pi-lar!_ ”  
  
Stevie sounds like he has to wipe tears from his eyes by this point, but he recovers enough of his voice to give in.  
  
“OK, OK… I’m saving your arse this time. But I want a picture. Full family portrait, no fucking about, a’right?”  
  
The question _what the fuck for?_ is poised to dart off Xabi’s tongue dripping in curare-levels toxicity, but he sees both its naiveté and its pointlessness just in time.  
  
“Fine, whatever,” he says, rubbing his outstretched thumb and middle finger into his temples to the point of pain.  
  
“You will get your cheap entertainment. Just let me make an exit with dignity, is that too much to ask?”  
  
“Well… you could always get on a very late or very early plane and come get drunker with us. I’m sure you’ve heard they’re throwing me a party before they start to roll me over towards the glue factory.”  
  
Stevie’s voice starts to leak the sort of ridiculous yearning he could have sworn he was over years ago and this is a stupid, stupid conversation to have at _way the fuck too early_ o’clock.  
  
“The Olympiakos lads are bringing the ouzo, so you’d land just in time to catch up with Mellor and Didi under the tables. If you’re unlucky,” he adds, his throat drowning in forced giddiness, but it’s suddenly way too late.  
  
Xabi comes to his rescue despite himself.  
  
“Did Mellor get fat?”  
  
“Uh.. well… retirement looks good on him, let’s put it that way. Still got the most luscious barnet this side of The Wirral though. And if you want to have a whine about bad dye jobs… I’ll send you a picture of Riise’s slutty brunette do tomorrow. Looks like the bastard child of the mum from the Adams family and a troll.”  
  
Xabi chuckles. He’s in no mood to pay him compliments as things stand, but it’s a little unnerving how Stevie’s vivid imagination can still surprise him.  
  
He fishes a glass of scotch off the bar. He downs it in a silent toast to whoever intimidated and/or bribed the DJ into finally switching to Rhianna for a change. It tastes chemical cheap the way only overpriced hotel booze truly can, so of course he gestures to the uninterested looking bartender for another shot.  
  
“Do you ever think what would have happened if we didn’t… that night…,” Xabi stares at the bottom of the glass in search for the kind of coherence single malt was invented to obliterate.  
  
“Only every time I rewatch it.”  
  
 _Carra would’ve probably made a better Captain. You’d have never noticed I was gone._  
  
Except Xabi has already lived that life in his head once or twice. It’s one of the many he’s lived there. He has already gone through a theoretical life of football where supernova shots don’t go in on the eighty sixth minute mark to save the day (not to mention the season); where he’s twenty three and adrift in a sea of red and he does notice a Stevie-shaped hole in the midfield once a perfectly ordinary May comes and goes. Only every time he pictures it.  
  
“I think I need more alcohol,” Xabi mutters, pulling his lower lip across his teeth.  
  
The bartender approaches him with a smug knowing grin and a bottle of Chivas Regal. Xabi gives him a flinty look over the rim of his magically empty glass, but fuck pride. It’s a needs must kind of night, so he relents and hands over his glass for yet another refill.  
  
“That’s the spirit. Better hurry back, mate. Ramos is probably already in trouble by now,” Steven says, still amused even though the serrated edge of cruelty is gone from his merriment.  
  
“At least he is no longer doing the karaoke on the table. Is hard to think such a thing is possible, but he is actually worse at it than you are.”  
  
“I’ll believe it when I see it. Don’t forget about my pictu…”  
  
Xabi regrets the silent, gutless anticlimax of slamming a smart phone in someone’s face. He would give anything for a good old clunky rotary dial right now.  
  
When he trudges away from the bar with fresh supplies of Chivas, he’s somewhat relieved to find that Sergio is in fact quite sedate and still where he’s left him. For the sake of precision, that is squished between silk-embroidered golden sofa pillows and a golden-haired 19 year-old ( _Let’s hope so…_ ).  
  
His hair is still the loudest fucking thing in the room though.  
  
The other half of the sofa, Xabi’s half, is still covered in his Adidas jacket and the hotpanted and equally blonde mother of… Xabi draws a blank on either name.  
  
“ _Ey, tio, we thought you drowned_ ,” Sergio exclaims, bright-eyed and resting a hand on a bare knee thrust ever closer in his direction.  
  
He seems to have bonded with his… guest to the point where it’s not that big of a stretch to speak of _we_ and he no longer requires Xabi’s assistance in discussing Beverly Hills’ trendiest spots with a local. It involves a lot of grunts and hand signals, but they get by.  
  
Xabi removes his jacket from the sofa and sinks back into his corner weighed down by blended scotch and misery. Drowning in either is quite appealing at the moment, but he’d prefer the booze if it came down to it. His companion for the evening shifts to make room, but they’re still in desperate close quarters and she is still wearing sequined hotpants.  
  
“They always manage to make the expensive stuff taste ordinary in these places, have you noticed?” she asks, a note of strain in her voice.  
  
Xabi nods into his glass, a sudden rush of guilt at not having brought a drink for… _joder_ … he doesn’t normally forget names, his own included, until after the sixth or seventh glass.  
  
“I used to mix drinks in this shithole of a tiki bar outside Tijuana. Before…,” she nods affectionately towards her daughter. “Lemme tell you, these Beverly Hills creeps are all flash and no spunk for a good stiff drink.”  
  
Xabi is starting to wish he hadn’t picked this of all nights to be a morose drunk. Just because there is a hefty bill that’s about to be dropped on The Tragically Bleached doesn’t mean he should forget his manners. Just because his mind and various other parts of him are somewhere far away... He suddenly remembers that one of them is Nellie or Nelly, but since both sound like stupid names to Xabi, he just picks Nellie for the mother. He has not really had to deal with the younger Maybe Nellie, not beyond catching the absent look in her eyes while translating Sergio’s excitement over the fact that they use the same range of self-tanning products.  
  
“Cannot be too picky when it comes to a good hammer to the head,” he says, his fingers absently feeling for the phone in his pocket.  
  
“Must be someone important to get you so worked up in the middle of the party,” Nellie says with an over-tanned, crinkly but not at all unpleasant smile.  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“On the phone… Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare…”  
  
Xabi lets his head drop back. It makes his head dizzy and his mouth sour.  
  
“Oh, is nothing… I have only been in love with him for ninety percent of my adult life, ’s all.”  
  
He frowns for a moment, just as long as it takes for the words to settle in corners of his chest where he can feel an unwelcome resistance movement to getting shitfaced starting to take up arms, like a holy anti Chivas coalition. Xabi is suddenly reluctant to look at Nellie because he could do something drastic right now, like wrap her into a hug.  
  
She crooks a sympathetic smile at him, caught between motherly and pitying, when Xabi’s phone starts ringing at last.  
  
He stares at it. Does nothing. Nellie bows her head towards him.  
  
“In my professional opinion, your friend Sergio is two cocktails away from dropping unconscious and I hope you don’t mind me saying but… it’s probably best for everyone if we help him along. How about I take Nellie to the ladies’ room to powder our noses and you go find me a bottle of rum for some Tijuana magic?” Not-Nellie whispers low in Xabi’s ear, watching light return to his glazy eyes.  
  
The phone stops ringing. Xabi shoots a message with hurried taps, already eyeing the bar.  
  
 _Think I have this solved. Have fun tomorrow…_  
  
 _…_  
  
 _wheres me picture???_  
  


 

  
_You could travel the world_  
 _But nothing comes close_  
 _To the golden coast_  
 _Once you party with us_  
 _You’ll be falling in love_  
 _Ooooh Oh Ooooh_

_~_

  
The indignity of it all does not strike Xabi in full until he’s buckled up on a plane to Miami the next day and Álvaro catches him mumbling something about West Coast representing _now put your hands up_ into the Esquire he is using to kill his hungover brain.  
  
They don’t talk about it.  


The End

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. [Sergio's hair and the hotpants are (sur)real](http://25.media.tumblr.com/49d1009caf7930c2e2d09424a9e810bf/tumblr_mqyowyNcT71scyhcco1_500.jpg), but that's about it. Those ladies are probably amazing marine  
> biologists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in town for a conference and not related and I meant no offense! The only things I'm actually mocking are Xabi's drunk!miserable!face and Sergio's hair (no apologies for that one).
> 
> 2\. Thank you to the amazing Trimalchio for the soundtrack, which you can find [here](https://www.mediafire.com/folder/9nmp4y79dj1n7/Wingspan_Unbelievable). I still haven't stopped laughing at SOS. I may never stop. A big thanks also goes to the organizers of Futbal Minibang, check out the collection for more results of their hard work. 
> 
> 3\. Whatever's funny in this was written by ballade_at_thirtyfive the night (after) this picture was taken. This is for her, thank you for helping me get through that giggle fit.


End file.
